June 23, 2008

When you realize that you left iTunes running before leaving for your in-laws' 45th wedding anniversary. And that when you returned six hours later, half-filled bottle of wine in hand, you were still only half-way through your Dylan catalog.

Even worse? The secondary realization that you really should get a Twitter account.

June 13, 2008

Yes, that's the powerful effect of the succulent, slightly-peachy burst of the first ripe Winona strawberry of the year for Maia. We have a 100 square-foot patch of these guys in the garden. It started as 50 plants from Gurney's last year, and probably holds 400 or so this year—all from runners. And that's after we thinned it out. A really prolific grower. My guess, based on the berries currently forming and from last year's yields, is that we'll get about 200+ pints of strawberries from that 10' x 10' square of yard. Not bad for a $20 investment in bare-root plants and a few hours a summer of weeding. And is there really any amount of money worth being able to get your daughter out of bed instantly (she's an even bigger night-owl/morning sleep-monster than I am) with a single word? "Strawberries!"

It's actually a banner day here at the Arthur Street Agricultural Station (as my wife sometimes laments), as we also got the first blooming rose of the year from our Morden Sunrise shrub. The Morden Sunrise is one of the Canadian Parklands roses. Our Champlain and Winnipeg Parks roses (also both Ag Canada roses, the former from the "Explorer" series and the latter also from the "Parklands" series) are thriving and about to bloom as well. All three survived our extraordinarily long winter without fuss and bloomed wildly last year (their first) without problems. Apart from some composting, mulching, and weeding, we only used Bonide's systemic rose care--and that sparingly. Thus encouraged in my neophyte gardening, I've installed several other of the Ag Canada roses around the yard this year: a William Baffin to hold down the fort between our two raspberry beds, a couple of John Cabots to climb an empty corner of the fence behind the asparagus and butterfly garden, as well as George Vancouver and Hope for Humanity shrubs to fill in what used to be a large patch of grass between our four blueberry bushes (which, frankly, are probably terminal, despite my best efforts to amend the soil/fertilize/etcetera).

So now, that Morden Sunrise:

Of course, a rose is a rose is a rose. Except, I think Gertrude Stein's famous line (reused again and again throughout her career—and parodied relentlessly, cf. this Wikipedia page) is about more than a thing being a thing, about a noun's own ability to announce or advance it presence (about both itself and about its referents && note: wouldn't it have been a gas if Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein had gotten the chance to have tea?). Quite apart from the sly suggestiveness of Stein's line (about which she later said, "I think that in that line the rose is really red for the first time in a hundred years."), is the even more suggestive, much more sly, and, I think, more useful fact (again: if only we could have gotten L.W. and G.S. together for a chat!) that not only do things carry in their raw state a kind of radiant suggestiveness that can be all the more powerful for having been stripped away of our explicit attempts at glomming meaning onto them (they have plenty enough, if only we pay attention to them), but...

That they do this even though, in the course of things, almost everything to which we would like to attach some "thinginess" is almost impossibly variant (no, I promise, I won't go into Aristotle's metaphysics here—though it was once worth quite a chuckle when a classmate of mine inadvertently asked about Socrates P-ness in a seminar given by Norman Dahl). Even this Morden Sunrise rose (not red!) ranges from an almost fiery orange to a pale yellow depending on the heat and humidity at the time it blooms (they'll be almost pure yellow later in the summer, and if you grow them in the warmer states, they're almost never tinged with the deep orange you'll get here in Minnesota)—and yet it is every bit a rose.

All of which is to announce that I've turned 40 (Wednesday), am surprisingly not dead yet, and have decided to crank this blog back in action again (OK, I promise: really. This time. If it matters to you.). It seems to me that in my attempts to crank out the next GAN (yes, an ambition I still hold, even after all these long years since I first blew myself away reading The Adventures of Augie March in the back rows of an Intro to Logic lecture), I have given too little attention to the possibilities of blogging. Especially its opportunities for building community, passing on small bits of knowledge (evidently, from the traffic from this post, knowledge of bourbon is in high demand: it's the most-trafficked ), and gaining unexpected knowledge from the odd corners of the world. So look for more on gardening, the cosmopolitan ethics of living in a world of 10B people, the occasional sideways crack at culture, etcetera.

But for now, enjoy the roses, folks. As for me, I've got to figure out the connection between radishes and the condition of the human soul...

March 25, 2008

OK, I now have about thirty tabs open in Firefox for possible blog entries...

Here's the thing: I really feel torn about this blogging thing—is it an enemy of promise? Or a better way to fill the interstices of the day than MLB08-The Show (which is about all the baseball enjoyment I stand to gain this year, as the Twins look fit to lose 100 games)? I can't go on. I'll go on.

So, tortured as it is, I clear the tabs....

1) Two cents on the "bookshelves" debate: I'm an admitted junkie, but I think McLemee is more-or-less right: book junkies don't really care who sees a book on their shelves, so long as the book is there and is not silently conspiring against its owner. But they do conspire, guerillas against our ignorance, our sloth, and worse: our desire to know more than we experience. Now, a note to the world: will you please conspire to find a way to afford Scott McLemee, say, two fully-funded years to write a book? There are few people from whom I'd rather see a big, fat book.

2) "Where are all the Iraq War novels?" asks Greg Cowles at the New York Times. I answer (one among a number of good ones) in the comments section, but you might also check out the talk I had last fall with Matthew Eck.

3) I'm a fair-weather fan of Dave Eggers (or, more accurately, "Dave Eggers"), but the 826 Valencia project is great. If you're up for a very highly caffeinated talk by Dave on that project, his TED speech is really motivational. If anyone starts a project like this in Minneapolis & happens upon this note, definitely drop me a line.

4) The Valve discovers Alan Shapiro. I met him at Bread Loaf way back in 1996—in addition to being a wonderful poet, he tells really great jokes (though it must be said, not nearly as many or with as much gusto as Richard Bausch). The VQR essay referenced by Amardeep is a must-read: a great essay. Plus: the "form is ideology" thing is not only wrong, but tired (see, too: "Plot as Teleology"): there are just too many things "at work" in a poem (or narrative) for this kind of essentialism to be more than a kind of cheap crib.

5) Litblog Co-op is no more. Sad to hear—but I think it's safe to say that the blogosphere thrives anyway. I do wish that more bloggers would coalesce around group blogs (me, too, frankly, if I could find one that suited me—and vice-versa: we need more blogs as hootenanies, group jams, basement tapes).

6) The Internet: a big group hug. A nice talk by Clay Shirky, but one that should be footnoted with... "Uh, Clay: AT&T is now—and again—the largest phone company in the United States."

7) V.S. Naipaul: because every long list of links should have at least one really CRANKY one. This one in two parts!

8) I have a long list of adds to the NBCC Crit Pix, but John Freeman noticed that Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age was noted with surprising frequency. Honestly? It's a great book! I can take or leave his defense of Robert Frost, but his essays on Lowell and W.C. Williams—plus the set-pieces "The Obscurity of the Poet" and "The Age of Criticism"--are worth the price of admission. Here's Jarrell on Williams' poetics:

"So far as organization and metre and rhyme are concerned, he is a sort of homeopath or chiropractor impatient of anything but his own fragment of the truth. Yet it is such a wonderful and individual fragment, an eighth- or quarter-truth so magnificently suited to a special case, that we cannot help feeling that his illusion about form is one of those 'necessary heuristic fictions' of the scientist. If you have gone to the moon in a Fourth of July rocket you built yourself, you can be forgiven for looking askance at Pegasus."

PS: Another collection that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet is Richard Howard's Alone with America.

9) Lynndie England interviewed in Die Stern: just when you had forgotten that for too many of our fine military personnel the "Enlightenment Project" was that weekend the SeeBees strung wire and hooked up a generator for the Conex boxes. From my early reading of excerpts/interviews from Errol Morris's forthcoming effort on Abu Ghraib, it seems like England was played the fool (too bad she couldn't have been Bottom in this—but then: Bottom didn't play in a tragedy).

10) You know how people are always recommending books to you as a classic? Twice in as many weeks, I've actually followed up on this & been pleased to find the books in question really were classics. First, a pal got me to take James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime off the shelves and read it: a masterpiece. Second, Jim Lewis plugged Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo in Slate. I'd never heard of this little gem—but Lewis is right: a brilliant disaster of a book, a wreck that will leave you haunted.

March 20, 2008

So, it's spring. In the shadier parts of the yard in which a foot or so of snow still lies it doesn't look like it (and snow again tonight, from the sounds of it), but a brief walk through the yard tells me it's here:

Creeping Charlie can evidently grow beneath snow, as it seems to have overgrown everything it can between our early snowfall last year and the quick melt over the past week.

Daffodils are peeping 1" green shoots up out of the leaves and mulch.

The strawberry patches are already green beneath the snow and showing new signs of growth.

The oregano and tarragon and thyme are already busy sending up new growth--not to mention the mint, which also seems to have thrived beneath our four month blanket of snow. I even noticed, amidst the dead plants I didn't bother to pluck from the early snow last year that some fallen coriander seeds have begun their second lives as cilantro.

Got the new Levenger catalog today (and what does "new" mean for those guys, anyway? this week's?) and saw the item listing for their Page Points—which used to be my favorite Levenger item. They still are, sort of: except that Levenger changed the design of their Page Points and the old (and better) design can be had for 1/2 the price at Lee Valley Tools, where they sell them as book darts. Book darts, very handy:

... and as you can see: you can sure go through a lot of them. If I use 50 on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (a real possibility—and I'm not quite done), that adds $10 to the "price" of the book. But it would have been $20 if I still shopped for them at Levenger.

Yes, that is a Brodart wrapper on the dust jacket. Most economical way to buy them is direct from Brodart, in the huge rolls. I like the Just-A-Fold III Archival Quality covers. Works out to about $.50 a hardcover. Totally worth it: more than one book has been saved from a spill by a quick lifting of the cover and gentle wiping of the plastic.

OK, that's the enough of this week's installment of "The Frugal Librarian." Next week: how shopping at Oriental foods wholesalers can really put the zing back into your reading habits!

November 28, 2007

I do love The New York Times, but every once in a while they write something that's so ridiculously effete or wrong-headedly, you know, New York, that my inner Marine or Fly-Fisherman or cranky, sullen Middle-Westerner gets the best of me and I just shake my head.

Tonight it was reading their article, "Bourbon's Shot at the Big Time." There should just never be a sentence about Bourbon written like the following: "We all noted the wide range of flavors in these bourbons, from creamy chocolate and fruity to grassy and herbaceous." This makes a selection of the United States' only native contribution to the bounties of fermentation sound like a party of cows getting it on at the Christopher Street Piers. Bourbon's chief virtues are its clean palate (you should only drink it one of two ways: straight or with one or two ice cubes and a splash of water) and its slightly-sweet, somewhat oak-tinged flavor. To the degree that a Bourbon is smooth and drinkable on that basis, it's a good Bourbon. It shouldn't taste like an old boot dug up from a peat bog or like someone dumped a dairy pail full of potpourri into the barrel. And yes, like Marine, it's always capitalized (even if, like me, you have a mixed relationship with the subject).

Most importantly: no list of essential Bourbon's should exclude Maker's Mark. That's just wrong.

With the exception of a case of beer or so a month, depending on the season—less in the Winter and more in the Summer—all I drink is Bourbon. And here's what I drink, when I drink it, and why.

1. Maker's Mark. 70% of the time. For price/taste/danger value, this is the Bourbon to keep on your desk. I generally drink from about 10 PM until 2 AM, maybe starting a little sooner and ending either earlier or later depending on what's on the calendar for the following day. I start with a couple of ice cubes, a splash of water, and then just keep the bottle on my desk or end-table until I go to sleep. As such, I sip slowly over a long period of time. There are better tasting Bourbons, but none so reasonably-priced, so good, and so unlikely to leave you feeling like someone crawled inside your brain, dug a trench with an e-tool, and took a healthy shit as Maker's Mark.

2. Knob Creek. 20% of the time. Used to be 100% of the time, because among reasonably-priced Bourbons it's the easy champion all the way around. Unfortunately, it's about 20% more expensive than Maker's Mark and about the same amount stronger. Which means that if you drink it like I do—in slow sips over a more-or-less regulated period of time—you're liable to spend 20% more and get 20% more drunk. Flavor is no small thing, but Knob Creek's advantage over Maker's Mark doesn't exceed the algebra in calculating poorer and more-likely-to-be-hungover.

3. Bulleit. 4% of the time. This is a newer Bourbon on the shelves in Minnesota. It's cheaper by 20% than Maker's Mark, and not bad—but it's not as good. Whenever I buy a bottle (and I buy a bottle of Bourbon every week and have done so for the past ten years, at least), I think, "OK. But I'm picking up Maker's Mark next time."

4. Woodford Reserve. 3% of the time. I think this is about the same price as Maker's Mark. Maybe between Maker's and Knob Creek. It's a very good Bourbon. Maybe I should drink it more, but maybe the bottle is just too well-designed. It's true that Duffy here in Minneapolis designed the whole line of fancy Jim Beam Bourbons (Knob Creek, Basil Hayden's, etcetera) and did a marvelous job... but at least they had the sense to build the brands around Bourbon-looking themes. Woodford Reserve looks like what Kenneth Cole would design if he was designing a bottle of Bourbon.

5. Evan Williams Single Barrel. 3% of the time. This is a pretty good Bourbon, reasonably priced. Along with Bulleit, though, it's one that I always finish with the thought, "Next time, Knob Creek or Maker's Mark."

A few final thoughts on the New York Times piece: Under no circumstances should you buy Jim Beam Black over any of the Bourbons listed above. It's not better and it's not better priced than the Bulleit or the Evan Williams Single Barrel. Also: Bourbon should never be more expensive than Knob Creek. It's an everyday sipping booze, folks. If you want to drop $100 on something, get a rare single malt, a nice Cohiba, and spend a night getting so drunk and stinky that you don't care that you still smell (and feel) like an old boot dug up from a peat bog in the morning.

Update: Just back from liquor store and it appears that Maker's Mark is the same price as Knob Creek (at least for the 750ml—a little less for the 1.75l). The Maker's Mark has gone up. Just in time for the holidays? You wonder. So I bought Knob Creek and am here to report it's still just as strong and just as good as it was the last time. Like I said: the class-act of the non-ridiculous Bourbons. Also, the Woodford Reserve was a few dollars more expensive than the Maker's Mark and Knob Creek. Curious: is there a liquor distributor in the audience? How often do these prices change/how much to they vary?

November 25, 2007

Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems
characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski
occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I
was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions
of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact
that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the
exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can
appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and
Gary Snyder.

I've always avoided Bukowski. Don't know why really—some part just not getting around to it and some part about "perceptions...muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits." Maybe, too, that I grew up around bars and drunks and houses falling down the hills of West Duluth and joined the Marine Corps and went to the University of Minnesota to get away from all that. Still, you are who you are: I remember, as a very little kid visiting my dad's father's place in Hammond, Indiana and seeing—and falling in love with—a gigantic bottle of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels (you could fit an Eisenhower half dollar through the mouth and it must have been two or three feet tall & it was all we could do to turn the thing over an empty all the coins out onto the cold, hard floors in our search for Indianhead and wheat and steel pennies, buffalo nickels and mercury dimes...): anyway, this gigantic bottle that went some ways toward pickling the old man had a life-size set of rubber tits molded around it. For some reason, whenever I think of Bukowski, I think of those rubber tits and booze and scrounging for pennies & their place in that haunted little 800 square foot house in Hammond on a sweltering July day.

So, yes: maybe it's time to go and read some Bukowski. Maybe even pour a couple of shots of Bourbon, too... it's hard to know what is necessary and what isn't—what's still working and what's fucked up beyond recognition—when you're playing in the Theater of the Soul. You shouldn't, really, be playing there—and it shouldn't be theater—but you do and it is. But isn't that part of Bukowski's thing? Or Mailer's or Hemingway's or Hunter S. Thompson's? To make the play inseparable from reality, each a back-door into the other. Of course, in each of those cases the door became locked and contained some pretty bad shit, but maybe that's just another part of the play... and the reality.

November 15, 2007

A USA Today reporter called me a couple years ago to ask, “Which of the
300 books published about the Iraq war”—and this was 2005, just two
years into the war—“are going to last like Jarhead and Baghdad Express
seem destined to do?” Setting aside the assumption that
either my book or Tony’s was going to “last,” the question struck me as
ridiculous: “No one knows,” would have been the only proper answer to both her assumption and her question. But
you know—you have to play the game, right? I mentioned Generation Kill
as a likely candidate, but then said there were two big problems
inherent in any book coming out so quickly after its author had served
in a war (or a journalist had covered it): “Did they know how to write
a novel or memoir?” and “Could they get their head around it—all the
wayaround: morally, aesthetically, and so on?”

I looked back at how it had taken Hemingway and Remarque ten years or
so to digest World War One and how, with the exception of Mailer—who
had won the Story competition while still at Harvard prior to his WWII
enlistment, most of what we now consider the classic
accounts—especially in memoir—had taken decades: With the Old Breed by
Eugene Sledge came out in 1981; Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang in
1979; Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier—out in 1967—was almost
precocious by comparison.

There are always exceptions, it’s true, but in general: the longer you
wait, with war, the more likely you are to have developed your chops as
a writer and cleared your head—and prepared your heart—for the journeys
you have to take through your experiences & the even more difficult
one of preparing it in such a way that others might take that same
journey.

Now, along comes Matthew Eck with The Farther Shore & we’re lucky he took his time: he’s delivered a small masterpiece.

It was difficult to get to know the Vietnamese. For a start there was the language barrier. Vietnamese is a tonal language. Take the word Ba. Pronounced alto it means three. Soprano it means grandfather. Bass—poisoned food, Mezzo-Soprano—any. Heaven knows what Victoria and I ended up asking for every time we ordered the local 333 beer.

For starters, there's a nice rhythm to this paragraph. The exemplary list of difficulties culminates in a joke which is not extended beyond what is necessary. Finally, what is conveyed is not only the fact and nature of Smith's troubles, but a nice kicker about her personality: she is the sort of traveler who not only goes for a beer, but the local beer. All told in just 58 words.